A financial terminal is the right purchase when your team bills for their time, needs real-time data, and runs a repeatable daily research workflow. This guide walks through the six criteria to evaluate, the decision framework that works, and the mistakes that lock teams into the wrong tool for three years.
Skip the sales-pitch demo until you can answer these for your team.
Audit the last 30 days on the current tool. List the top 10 functions your desk uses daily. Anything outside that list is feature you're paying for and not using.
15-minute delayed quotes are useless during market hours. If you bill for your time, real-time is non-negotiable. If you don't, free tools are fine.
Equities, ETFs, indices, FX, futures, options, bonds. Some tools dominate one (FactSet for fundamentals, Bloomberg for FX/rates). Most teams only need the equity slice.
Bloomberg takes weeks per analyst — that's a real productivity cost. Browser-native tools onboard in minutes and run anywhere.
The strongest play is rarely all-Bloomberg or all-Godel. Bloomberg on IB-chat desks, a modern alternative for the rest of the team.
Pull the team through this before scheduling the vendor demo — otherwise the demo just steers the decision.
Map every license, the user, the workflows they run daily, and what they'd miss if you cancelled tomorrow. Most firms find 30–50% of seats are coasting on inertia.
An "analyst" on the FX desk needs different tools than an "analyst" on equity research. The tool decision sits at the workflow level.
Two weeks. Same desk, same names, current tool on screen one and the candidate on screen two. Don't evaluate based on the sales demo — evaluate based on a Wednesday morning earnings drop.
Every tool has gaps. Get them in writing from the vendor (roadmap items, workarounds) before you commit to a multi-year contract.
The patterns that put teams on the wrong tool for years.
We'll audit your current stack, segment by workflow, and show where starting at $996/seat covers the daily research workload.